Canon PIXMA mini260 review

This compact Canon inkjet printer is easy to use and prints good photos, but it's not cheap.

Canon's PIXMA mini260 is a compact printer that can print photographs up to 6 x 4in in size. It's about the size of a sandwich toaster and has a pull-out handle that makes it easy to carry around. It doesn't come with a battery, but you can buy one for about '50 if you really need to print photos when you're away from a mains socket.

Unlike HP's compact photo inkjets, which print with three colours, the mini260 has four inks, contained within a single cartridge. You can buy ink and paper in a 100-print bundle, with each print costing around 18p. That's not bad, but competitors such as the HP Photosmart A618 or Epson's PictureMate range print pictures for less. The mini260 itself is a bit expensive too, costing more than similarly-specified printers, such as the A618 or Epson's PictureMate 240.

As you'd expect of a dedicated photo printer, the mini260 makes it easy to reel off high-quality prints. If you have a digital camera, you can connect it directly to the printer's PictBridge port, or take out its memory card and slot it into the built-in card reader. If you want to edit your pictures first, you can use the mini260 to copy them to your PC and print them later using Canon's easy to install and well designed software. Unfortunately, you'll be scuppered if your camera uses the increasingly popular xD card format as the printer can't use it without an adaptor.

This isn't the fastest photo printer we've tested, but it delivers very impressive results. We couldn't spot any grain at all in its sharp, detailed photographs, and dark, deep colours were bolder than we've seen from three-ink competitors. When printing from a computer, colours were very faithful to the original image, but photos printed directly from an SD card had a slight green tint.

The mini260 is easy to use and produces great prints, but they aren't much better than those from the PictureMate 240, which you can buy for '40 less. It's a good printer, but we can't recommend it at this price.